What is traditional philosophy of science

Philosophy Of Biological Science is a wave of philosophy of science that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s of this century. Although its emergence was mainly based on the vigorous development of life sciences after the 1950s of this century, philosophers engaged in the philosophy of life sciences did not confine themselves to seeing their philosophy as a departmental philosophy, but went further and saw their philosophy as a new paradigm of philosophy of science as opposed to the traditional philosophy of science rooted in the physical sciences. But philosophers working on the philosophy of life sciences do not limit themselves to seeing their philosophy as a sectoral philosophy, but go further and see their philosophy as a new paradigm of the philosophy of science: a new philosophy of science as opposed to the traditional philosophy of science rooted in the physical sciences.

Contemporary references to the philosophy of life sciences thus have two meanings. Narrowly speaking, the philosophy of life science is the philosophy about biology, which mainly studies the nature of life, the theoretical structure of biology, conceptual framework, general methods and other issues. In other words, philosophy of life sciences is the philosophical discipline about the ontology, epistemology and methodology of life. In this sense, "philosophy of life science" is "philosophy of biology", which is a sub-discipline of philosophy of science. Broadly speaking, philosophy of life science is a new trend of philosophy of science. The traditional philosophy of science is based on the physical sciences (including physics and chemistry), so the new philosophers call this philosophy the Philosophy Of Physical Science. The new philosophy is mainly based on the life sciences while taking into account the physical sciences. So in order to emphasize the difference between the new philosophy and the traditional philosophy, some philosophers call this new philosophy the Philosophy Of Life Science.

1 The background of the emergence of philosophy of life sciences

Natural science is the foundation of philosophy, and the emergence of any kind of philosophy is closely related to the scientific background at that time. Modern science began in 1543, although one of the two great works published in this year-Vesari's The Construction of the Human Body-is a branch of biology, but in the following one hundred years, biology did not develop by leaps and bounds, while kinesiology and mechanics were the first to be developed rapidly.1687, Newton's In 1687, Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy was published, and the grand edifice of classical mechanics was finally completed. Thereafter, the other disciplines of the physical sciences also developed and matured. In contrast, biology in Newton's time was still in the gestation period, in Engels' words, "still in the stage of collecting materials", and Newton's physical revolution did not cause revolutionary changes in biology at that time. Newton's physical revolution did not lead to a revolutionary change in biology at that time. It was only in the 19th and 20th centuries that major innovations in biological thought began to emerge. Thus, when the philosophy of science began to develop in the 17th and 18th centuries, or when Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant addressed science and the scientific method, it was based entirely on the physical sciences. In this context, the ideas and methods of the physical sciences naturally became the standard by which all sciences were judged, and most philosophers took for granted that the physical sciences were the standard paradigm of science, believing that once the physical sciences were understood, any other science could be understood. Although as early as the middle of the 19th century, Darwin had said that the achievements of biology will make philosophy appear new prosperity, but the philosophy of science in the 19th century is still completely rooted in the physical sciences, whether it is the first generation of positivism (Comte) or the second generation of positivism (Mach), their thesis on the nature of science, the theoretical structure of science and the conceptual framework of science, scientific method and so on, is completely based on classical physics. based on classical physics. In the 20th century, positivism developed into its third generation, logical positivism. As stated by the central figure of this theory, logical positivism is mainly based on the natural science theories of mathematical logic and the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics that were born at the beginning of the 20th century. In the face of this situation, the famous biologist and philosopher Ernst Mayr (Ernst Mayr) said with regret: "since Galileo, Descartes, Newton until the middle of the twentieth century, the philosophy of science has been dominated by logic, mathematics and physics for hundreds of years" ([2]. piv).

However, after the middle of this century, philosophical thinking about biology has become one of the hottest areas of discussion in the Western philosophy of science due to the crisis of the traditional philosophy of science itself as well as the revolution in molecular biology and the innovation of the comprehensive theory of evolution, which have made philosophers turn to the philosophical generalization of biology in order to find out the new paradigm of science from biology. In this discussion, the philosophy of biology gradually matured as a discipline.

We begin with the crisis of traditional philosophy of science, which has three main dogmas: first, the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions, which holds that propositions in the natural sciences are synthetic; second, reductionism, "that is, the view that every meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construction based on nouns referring to direct experience "; and the third is the deductive theory of explanation, which holds that scientific explanation is inference, and that an object in need of explanation is explained insofar as it can be deduced from some regular statement and some presuppositions. The second of these is the central proposition of logical positivism, a proposition which, to put it another way, holds that in science observation (or experience) and theory are completely separable, that the very nature of science is to build scientific theories on empirical grounds, and that the correctness of a scientific theory is determined by its ability to be confirmed. Quine has already criticized this dichotomy between experience and theory, as well as the second dogma, in The Two Dogmas of Empiricism. The decisive critique, however, comes from Popper. According to Popper, complete confirmation is impossible from a logical point of view, yet falsification is, conversely, possible. As a result, Popper proposed a falsificationist agenda for science: the hallmark of science is not its falsifiability, but its falsifiability. As a result of Popper's work, a major shift began to take place in the philosophy of science: from the study of the static structure of scientific theories to the study of their ephemeral structure. Thus Kuhn's paradigm theory, Lakatos's research program methodology, Feyerabend's anarchist methodology, and other philosophical theories of science emerged, causing a serious crisis in the traditional philosophy of science.

Let's look at the development of biology itself. Ever since J.D. Watson and F.H.C. Crick identified the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, biology has crossed into a new era of rapid development. In just over a decade, the genetic code was deciphered, the mechanism of gene function was clarified, and genetic engineering was implemented. At the same time, due to the penetration and synthesis of new knowledge, some old disciplines of biology, such as evolution, embryology, taxonomy and so on, also have a new look. For a time, a wave of research in biology appeared in the world, and biology became the fastest developing and most accomplished discipline since the revolution of relativity and quantum mechanics. These revolutionary developments in biology naturally attracted the attention of more and more philosophers. They either used the achievements of biology to re-evaluate the appropriateness of previous philosophies of science, or summarized unique epistemological, methodological and ontological issues from biology.

The crisis of the traditional philosophy of science and the continuing development of biology have thus made the philosophy of life sciences the most exciting area of contemporary research in the philosophy of science. There has been a proliferation of papers and theses, and in 1985, through the efforts of a number of philosophers and biologists, a journal devoted to the philosophy of the life sciences, Biology and Philosophy, was also launched in the West. It was in the 1970s that philosophy of life sciences as a new wave of philosophy of science emerged, and in the 1980s and 1990s, the discipline gradually matured and continued to develop.

2 Autonomy and Branching: Two Major Schools of Contemporary Philosophy of the Life Sciences

Almost all of the philosophy of biology published in the West in recent times has opened with the question of what place biology occupies in the system of sciences, or how biology differs from the physical sciences. According to Rosenberg, the question of the relationship between biology and the physical sciences is "the central problem of the philosophy of biology". Here, we can put it differently and see this question as fundamental to the philosophy of biology because, first, it is the question that any philosopher of biology must first ask and answer. "Whether and how biology is different from the other natural sciences is the most salient, obvious, frequently posed, and controversial question that the philosophy of biology... faces" ([3]. P13). Second, the different ways in which this question is answered, and the results, determine the ways in which almost all other questions discussed in the philosophy of biology are answered and the results. Almost all of the more specific questions raised by biologists and philosophers about the logic, epistemology, ontology, and methodology of biology revolve around this question, as is the case with the reductionism-versus-emergence debate, the sociobiological-scientificity debate, the mind-body relationship debate, and so on. Third, for biologists and philosophers of biology, different answers to this question reflect different views about the direction in which biology should move. What approach should be taken to the study of biology? What is the future focus of biology? Different answers to the question of the relationship between biology and physics are directly related to views on these questions.

The debate about the status of biology or the relationship between biology and the physical sciences has been between two opposing schools of thought, one of which may be called the branching theory and the other the autonomous theory. The branching theory argues that biology is not different from the physical sciences in principle and methodology, and that future research will at some point reduce the whole of biology to the physical sciences. In contrast, the autonomy theory takes it for granted that biology is an autonomous science because the objects of its study, its conceptual structure, and its methodology are fundamentally different from those of the physical sciences.

In connection with the background of the rise of the philosophy of life sciences mentioned earlier, we can see that branching and autonomy theories are actually two different reflections of the crisis of traditional philosophy of science and the rapid development of biology.

In terms of the turnaround in the philosophy of science, after the 1950s, due to Popper's critique, the philosophy of science moved from logical positivism to its opposite, historicism. However, not all philosophers followed Popper, Kuhn and others to abandon positivism in this turnaround; on the contrary, there were many philosophers who still adhered to the basic principles of positivism, but only modified positivism to varying degrees in the details. These philosophers have been referred to by some as Postpositivists (Postpositivist). The basic ideas of Postpositivism are:

(1) Science develops by establishing increasingly general empirical generalizations that are experimentally verified and explanatory, and these empirical generalizations are further organized into more general theories in order to broaden and deepen even more the explanatory unity and predictive accuracy of these generalizations;

(2) Scientific explanation is about subsuming the object of explanation into a universal law or law; (3) Scientific explanation is about subsuming the object of explanation into a universal law or law. (2) Scientific explanation is to subsume the object to be explained under universal laws or laws, and therefore any science needs laws or laws or at least improved generalizations;

(3) Science needs laws or laws also because the predictions and controls of practice are also based on laws or laws. Without laws, not only is explanation impossible, but prediction and control are even more impossible.

(4) Different disciplines have different discoveries, laws, and theories, but all of these discoveries, laws, and theories will eventually form a coherent theoretical ladder in which the theories and laws of all other disciplines can be deduced from the most basic theories and laws of physics, i.e., all disciplines can be ultimately unified in physics.

Of course the post-positivist view is not limited to what we have listed, but this is sufficient for our purposes. It is clear that these post-positivist views are merely further modifications of positivism, and that they are still based on the physical sciences. Are such conclusions about the nature of science appropriate for biology in the face of its astonishing advances?

It is clear that biology, in its present state, does not immediately and obviously fulfill the post-positivist account. Biology does not currently have as many laws or laws that are simple, precise, interconnected, and explanatory and predictive as the physical sciences; many of its discoveries and descriptive language have little connection to those of physics and chemistry; and the universality of the modeling systems it studies is limited. All of these features make it a good venue for validating a post-positivist philosophy of science. Are these differences superficial and temporary, or are they essential and eternal?

Thus, among philosophers, the question of whether and how biology is different from physics becomes the question of whether and how biology fits into the post-positivist philosophical picture. Philosophers who answered that it was compatible struggled to find material in biology to prove the universality of the post-positivist philosophical picture, and struggled to prove that the above differences between biology and physics were temporary. Philosophers who answer incompatible philosophers, on the contrary, look to biology for material to argue against the post-positivist philosophical picture, and try hard to show that the differences between biology and physics are never going to go away.

The above are the philosophical roots of the branching and autonomy arguments - post-positivism and antipositivism. The branching and autonomy debate also has its basis in the development of science itself.

The most exciting event in biology since mid-century has been the revolution in molecular biology. As a result of this revolution, many phenomena in biology can be explained on the basis of the structure of the DNA molecule. The success of molecular biology convinced many biologists, as well as philosophers, that all phenomena of biology could ultimately be fully explained on the basis of the physico-chemical laws of their components, and that the methods of physics and chemistry were perfectly suited to the study of biology. There are many reasons for this. There are many reasons for this. For the relevant parts of chemistry and physics ...... quantum mechanics, together with our empirical knowledge about chemistry, have shown to provide us with a deterministic basis for establishing biology in the same way that Newtonian mechanics ...... provides a basis for, say, mechanical engineering. " ([4].P10)

The reason why physics and chemistry can provide a "deterministic basis for biology," in these people's view, is that living organisms are ultimately made up of physical materials - molecules and atoms in motion. These molecules and atoms are clustered at different levels of organization in the organism, some even moving autonomously from others, but ultimately they are the products of physics and chemistry. Thus Crick says: "Ultimately one hopes that the whole of biology can be explained on the basis of levels lower than it and thus exactly from the atomic level." ([4] P. 12)

Since the biological organism can be explained in terms of the physical and chemical properties of its constituent parts, these biologists and philosophers go on to assert that the whole of biology will ultimately become a branch of physics and chemistry.

These biologists and philosophers are what we call branch theorists, and to summarize, they argue that "biology can best become a branch of the physical sciences, an independent branch capable of being developed through the application of the methods of the physical sciences, and now in particular the methods of physics and organic chemistry." ([3] P16) They cited molecular biology as the most successful example of the study of biology with physics and chemistry, and therefore, for them, the rest of biology should be as proactive and close to physical chemistry as molecular biology. At present, there are still major differences between biology and the physical sciences, and there are many phenomena of life that cannot yet be explained by physics and chemistry, but they believe that, as biology and physics evolve, they can eventually be explained by physics and chemistry.

In addition to molecular biology, however, the biological disciplines of population genetics, integrative evolution, ecology, behavior, and taxonomy have also been revolutionized in this century, "all showing unprecedented prosperity and thriving." Each of these disciplines has its own vocabulary, methodology, and conceptual structure, with little or minimal contact with other disciplines, especially the physical sciences. Thus, faced with the challenge of branching theory, biologists working in these disciplines, as well as philosophers collecting material from them, have argued that the methods of physics and chemistry are not fully suited to the subject-matter of biology, despite the exciting successes of these methods in the study of biology. They argued that "the really important goals of biology, and the appropriate methods for obtaining them, are so different from those of the other sciences that the theory and practice of biology must remain in constant isolation from the practice of physics and theory." ([3]. p16) These biologists and philosophers are autonomists. According to them, biology seeks to answer questions that physics cannot answer, and thus biology must utilize methods and approaches that physics cannot provide; of course, biology is free to borrow the theories and methods of physics, but it cannot simply develop by borrowing; it must develop its own methods. Biology can achieve some successes by using the methods of physics, but it will achieve greater and more obvious successes if it uses its own independent methods. Branchialism is consistent with post-positivism, but in the view of the autonomist, the post-positivist picture of science drawn from physics is completely wrong for biology. Biology is, of course, an autonomous discipline, and the post-positivist notion of scientific unity based on the physical sciences would lead biology astray and prevent its rapid development.

In addition to molecular biology and macrobiology's own research characteristics and methods that make some people support the branching theory and some people support the autonomy theory, the focus of future biological research in which is also an important reason, or motivation for people to support the branching theory or autonomy theory. The famous biologist and philosopher Ernst Mayr once said, "The conviction of many physicists that all biological insights can be reduced to the laws of physics has led many biologists to argue for the autonomy of biology in self-defense, and it is natural that not only physicists, but also philosophers who believe in essentialism, have strongly opposed this emancipatory movement in biology, but such a liberation movement has gained strength in recent decades. Do the principles, theories, and laws of the physical sciences account for everything in the biological sciences? Is biology, at least in part, an autonomous science? A dispassionate discussion of these questions is made very difficult by the apparent antagonism, even mutual hostility, of the physical and biological sciences. Many people have wanted to categorize the sciences and make mathematics (or geometry in particular) the queen of the sciences. In the competition for honors such as Nobel Prizes, government and university budgets, positions, and general prestige among non-scientists, this antagonism became very superficial." ([1]. pp37-38) From Mayr's words we can see that one of the major reasons biologists support or oppose biological autonomy is to justify the importance of the profession they practice.

3 The Development of the Debate

The autonomy and branching debates have centered around the basic question of "whether and how biology and physics are different. In terms of the degree of generality of the debated issues, there are several different levels of issues:

First, one of the most general issues is the question of whether the goals or strategies of research in biology and physics are the same. The autonomy thesis holds that there is a clear difference in the basic research strategies of biology and physics as follows: the explanatory framework of the physical sciences is mechanistic, whereas the explanatory framework of biology is purposeful, teleological, or functional. By mechanistic in this context is meant, broadly speaking, the view that the behavior of a system is determined through the Newtonian properties of its components - position and momentum (or their other alternatives) - and that the behavior of a mechanical (mechanistic) system is a mathematical function of the values of position and momentum of the components of that system. The physical sciences explain the phenomena they need to explain by extending these mechanical concepts and establishing such mathematical functions. The explanatory framework of biology is different and primarily teleological. Purpose theory in this context means explaining the behavior of a system by seeking its goals, functions, and needs. Biology explains biological phenomena not by seeking the mechanical behaviors that make up a living system, but by discovering the goals, functions, or needs that the system as a whole, and its components, serve. That is to say, biological explanations rely primarily on the correct dialectic of the goals served by a biological system, whereas in the physical sciences there is no place or space for the concepts of goals, objectives, functions, and needs. Thus, the overall goal of biological and physical science research is different: one explains a phenomenon by breaking it down into the mechanical behavior of its components, the other by defining a functional network within a given phenomenon. In this case, the basic research strategies of the two fields are necessarily different.

Branching theorists also recognize this difference between the physical and biological sciences in terms of their explanatory approaches, but in contrast to the autonomists, they view the difference as superficial and excludable.

The second level of the debate concerns the nature, number, and relation of theories in biology and the physical sciences. The objects of study in the physical sciences can be distinguished into different levels, and the study of objects at different levels can lead to different theories and the development of different branches of the discipline. These different disciplinary branches and theories may be studied and established independently, however, such a level has been reached in the physical sciences that theories of different levels can be logically and mathematically integrated. Mechanics, optics, heat, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, relativity, as well as the theory of chemical bonding, chemical dynamics, equilibrium constants, and so on, are so tightly linked that we can categorize these theories from the more fundamental to the derived, and then explain the derived ones in terms of the fundamental ones, and can predict the development of theories in one field based on the new advances of the theories in another field. By contrast, the connections between the various theories in the biological sciences are not as strong. The disciplines of evolution, genetics, ecology, paleontology, embryology, development, physiology, and so on all have their own theories, but the connections between these theories do not form deductive relationships that can be mathematically integrated as they do in the physical sciences. For example, evolution is as important to biology as Newtonian mechanics is to physics, yet their theoretical structures are quite different. The laws of Newtonian mechanics themselves can be expressed in mathematical formulas, the laws can be closely related to each other by reasoning, and the theoretical system can be built up by axiomatic methods, whereas the theoretical content of the theory of evolution can only be described qualitatively but not mathematically, even though some people have attempted to axiomatize the theory of evolution as well. Through Newtonian mechanics, a series of theories in other fields of physical sciences can be deduced, but through the theory of natural selection, it cannot be deduced, for example, in taxonomy, paleontology, morphology, embryology, ecology, and genetics, even though some people say that the theory of natural selection unifies these disciplines. In the face of these differences in the nature, number, and relationship of theories between the biological sciences and the physical sciences, the autonomy theory argues that this reflects the unique characteristics of the biological sciences themselves, indicating that biology is an autonomous science, while the branching theory argues that this difference is tentative, indicating that biology is not yet a particularly well-developed science, and that as biology develops, this difference will eventually disappear.

The third level of the debate concerns the existence and form of laws in biology. In general, theories in the physical sciences consist of a series of laws or laws that are integrated or deduced. Therefore, traditional philosophies of science have regarded laws or laws as symbols of scientific theories, and believed that any science should have its own unique laws or laws. The formation of the theoretical paradigm of the life sciences has led some to doubt this. Do theories in the biological sciences consist of laws or lemmas? In the current debate, some autonomists have put forward the negative opinion that there are no laws in the life sciences, and they think that the idea of laws or laws is a bias of the traditional philosophy of science, which should be abandoned by the new philosophy. If there are no laws in biology, how can biology exist and develop? These people believe that concepts play a central role in the theoretical structure of the biological sciences, and that the development of biology is manifested in the expansion of the meaning of concepts and the formulation of new concepts. However, there are also some autonomists who, like the branch theorists, recognize the existence of laws in biology, but who at the same time believe that such laws are unique and different from the laws of the physical sciences, not only in their content but also in their form. These autonomists argue that the laws of the physical sciences reflect push-pull causal mechanisms in which a prior cause produces one or more outcomes, whereas the laws of biology describe the relationship between a biological goal, purpose, or function and the biological system that is designed to obtain them. The relationship between a goal and the behavior it explains is not causal in the physical sense because in the physical sciences a subsequent goal does not explain the event that produces it, but in biology the prior event is explained by the goal. Thus, laws in the physical sciences are causal, whereas laws in the biological sciences are functional or teleological. Branchialists who object to this have long tried to analyze the meaning of what autonomists call laws so that they can also be expressed under non-purposive generalizations. Branch theorists have argued that living phenomena are nothing more than a complex variety of physical phenomena, so that descriptions of biological phenomena are no different in kind or in nature from descriptions of physical phenomena. For them, teleological descriptions are either convenient omissions of physical laws or transit points to alternative, more precise descriptions of living phenomena in terms of physical laws.

The fourth level of the debate is over the meaning of concepts and phrases that occur only in biology but not in the physical sciences. competition", "predation", "mimicry", and so on. In molecular biology, one has no qualms about using concepts like "recognition", "code", "error", etc. These are all teleological concepts. These concepts are teleological concepts, which do not exist in physics. Can they be translated into concepts that are not teleological? Does their existence in biology indicate that biology has a grossly erroneous content? These are questions that deserve deeper consideration.

In short, around the basic questions of the philosophy of biology, philosophers in from the overall research program, the goal until the individual concept of the four different levels of specific issues to carry out their own discussions, these issues that are different from each other and interconnected, so that the philosophy of biology from the overall both the diversity of content, but also show unity.